Making Science Public

The end of journals? Open access, impact and the production of knowledge

Under direction from the government, there is a drive to make publicly funded research open access; that is, if you go to the website where the journal article resides, non-subscribers will not be met by a page asking you to part with $30+ for the privilege of reading. Research articles will be free to read….but not free to publish. Instead of the publishing companies being funded by university libraries paying for journal subscriptions, income streams will instead come from authors. There are various models of open access available, but the underlying principle is that authors pay for their article to be published in a journal. The cost will generally be around £900 to £2000, which will theoretically be built into future proposals for research funding. While there is widespread support for tearing down the paywalls around research findings, changing publishing’s funding model raises some significant issues, not least for the social sciences where monographs (books) and other non-journal outputs play a more significant role than in the natural sciences (although this may be on the decline). If you are new to the debate, Here, I will concentrate on just one of the most far-reaching potential consequences – the withering away of the journal.

Are publishers worth the money…?

Placing the cost of publishing onto the author brings the role of publishing companies in the journal merry-go-round into sharp focus. Despite efforts by the industry to defend their role, it is striking to me that academic publishing’s unique selling point – peer review – is the one which is almost entirely unfunded, relying on the goodwill of academics to act as reviewers or editors. Having acted as a co-editor on the ENQUIRE postgraduate journal over the last 12 months, I have seen first-hand how the entire reviewing, editing and publishing process can be done for practically zero (financial) cost. This relies on a lot of goodwill and time, volunteered in the name of improving academic knowledge. Publishing companies may protest that they add value through superior promotion, websites, tagging, formatting etc. However, there are now low/no-cost models available around publicising papers via blogposts on which come pre-baked with attractive user interfaces and are well-indexed by search engines platforms (WordPress, Tumblr etc). Writing such a post also provides a useful way of writing a ‘plain English’ summary of articles which are often written in academic language. For an example, see Andy Balmer’s excellent blog post summary of his recent journal article on sex offenders and lie detection.

Are journal titles proxies for quality?

This is all very well, but the suspicion remains that the impact agenda is being driven by the status of the journals in which papers are published, which acts as a proxy for making a judgement on the quality of an article. While publishing companies maintain a stranglehold on the top journals and impact remains central to the HE agenda, these journals will continue to benefit from a stream of submissions from impact-hungry authors. But what if impact becomes less important in academia? Or perhaps more realistically, what if the interpretation of impact changes? The Wellcome Trust, admittedly a private funder, is already very explicit in asking funding applicants to submit their most *significant* publications for consideration, not necessarily those in the ‘best’ journals. This requires funding committees to actually read an article rather than surmise its quality from the journal which publishes it. I find this focus on quality of content heartening.

The future of journals

This leaves the question: what future for journals? I posed this to a panel at the LSE Future of Impact Conference on Tuesday. Stephen Curry‘s answer was closest to my own thoughts, which I will paraphrase as ‘journals were a good idea in the seventeenth century, but the idea is now coming apart at the seams’. If (and it is an if) we move to a focus on intrinsic quality of content, rather than the perceived quality of the journal itself, in conjunction with a drive towards open access based on a Creative Commons-BY licence allowing free reuse and republication of material (with attribution), what role remains for journals? Organising peer review perhaps, but why not have editorial boards break away from publishing houses and organise themselves more explicitly as subject-specific research networks, or as specifically tied to universities – a new form of university press perhaps? At least that way the ‘value added’ by a journal – chiefly through peer review – can be kept within the HE sector rather than leaching out to multinational publishing houses.

Journals decoupled?

The picture I paint here is one of current trends being taken to their logical conclusion, where the scholarly journal becomes decoupled from traditional publishers; moving to leaner models of closed peer review or incorporating more open refereeing and alternative metrics for judging paper quality. They are by no means certain to take hold quickly – there is a lot of inertia and interests in trying to maintain the status quo, as well as many good reasons for maintaining the expertise of peer review. However, public policy and technological advances have come together to challenge the traditional model of scholarly publishing. Academics and their institutions should consider responding boldly to ensure these changes serve the public interest above all others.

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Warren,
very interesting thoughts and I am in agreement with much of what you say. However, I am not convinced that getting rid of journals in their current form and function is on the cards. It is unlikely because they exist as symbolic markers of distinction, channelling attention (much the same with main stream media which still exists despite the surge in new social media). They combine aspects of attention and quality, translating them into the currency of academia: reputation. The hierarchy among the journals selects attention further. Not surprisingly, the institutional inertia keeps the old system going.

Contrast this with a flat publication platform; this has no equivalent mechanisms, it looks like a big pond from the outside. The new system would be the equivalent of a pass/fail system in the education system, would we find this desirable? In a way, already today everyone can publish what they want anyway (on blogs and websites), so it’s not even pass/fail, but pass for everything. We do not, cannot and want not read it all. Bourdieu’s distinction as a social process is quite powerful and here to stay.

What follows from this for alternative arrangements to paywalls and open access paid for by authors?
New technologies will drive down journal costs. Publishers’ profits need to be reigned in. A system of payment needs to be established which is fair to researchers, the publishers, and the public. If governments think that research is a public good they should finance it through some kind of taxation, perhaps through budgets for public libraries or research councils. Maybe industry needs to tell government that it is everyone’s interest to have free access to research output.

Thanks for comment. Agree journals’ demise is not imminent, but it may be visible on the horizon. Take your analogy with mainstream media and blogs, although the power of the former certainly seems to be being eroded. The music business has had one of the biggest shake-ups from the internet, but even there (weakened) record companies survive as a means of filtering and funnelling content for consumers. The flat ‘everyone can find what they want on MySpace’ model could never work due to the limits of time.

You say publishing costs will be driven down. I agree in principle, but if the top journals’ kudos is maintained, they will still be able to over-charge authors. It will take some efforts by academics to provide cheaper and *faster* routes to publication – only then might some of the shine come off the high-impact score journals. Peer review, however, remains key.

This is a very interesting topic and I think to be honest nobody really knows how things are going to turn out. I suspect and hope that many academics will just refuse to pay such large up-front costs.

My field (mathematics) has been quite active in standing up to the big publishing companies. Mathematician Tim Gowers wrote a blog post Elsevier – my part in its downfall in January this year, which attracted a lot of interest and led to the formation of http://thecostofknowledge.com/ , where people can sign up to boycott Elsevier (I haven’t signed up, but I have stopped writing for Elsevier journals).

Mathematicians have also been active in setting up their own journals, which can as you say be done quite easily with a bit of effort these days. Gowers mentions the journal of Toplogy. There is also the electronic journal of combinatorics, which was set up as a completely free electronic-only journal back in 1994 (yes, 1994!).

Thanks Paul – I nearly used something from ‘Cost of Knowledge’ for the image on this post. Combinatorics looks great – their open access policy is perfectly succinct. Am I right in thinking that ‘open’ peer review is quite common in mathematics? That is, posting work online and having colleagues check and review it before submitting to a journal? (Reading about Mochizuki posting his papers to his uni server reminded me about this).

Agree, the future is (as always) uncertain – this post sets out just one way the dots might get joined together.

Warren, no, it’s not really true that it’s common to post work online for checking before journal submission. What is common in maths and physics is for people to put a preprint of the paper on the ArXiv server at the same time as submitting it to the journal, which may or may not get a response (I recently wrote to an author of an ArXiv paper saying I thought he was wrong – it turned out that I was wrong!) . This is many people’s preferred solution to the open access question.
There are a few high-profile cases, for example the eccentric Russian mathematician Perelman who proved a long standing conjecture – he only put his work on ArXiv, it was never published in a journal, and he turned down a $1M prize!

The first link in the last para of the post (decoupling the journal) is a more radical example – opening up a paper to scrutiny and comment via Google Docs. Of course, at some point, the author has to declare the paper finished and publish it.

This is an interesting problem, and I would like to make some remarks as a Microeconomist. First of all, I feel that we should make a distinction between the Journals as institutions and the publishers which own them. Journals have editors and boards based in academia. Publishers behave as monopolists who add very little value to the publications what the editor could not do on their own. The outrageous monopoly prices publishers charge for a single article are a clear indication that the system is economically inefficient. Instead of thinking about throwing more tax money after companies which do not create any social value we should rather see how to get rid of them. Relaxing the copyright laws could help driving Elsevier&Co out of the market, since for their large administrative overhead they are possibly not competitive with leaner approaches to publishing (decreasing return to scale?). They know it, that’s why they are so vehemently lobbying against any reform of the copyright law. Anyway, I can not see any fundamental objection why a journal could not exists in the form of a non-for-profit institution.

Two other questions are completely independent of that. First, do journals serve an important role in the publication market? Second, is the current peer review system optimal?

Clearly it is the journal’s name which serves as a signal (not proxy!) of excellence, not the publisher. I do believe that in an exponentionally increasing market, we need some kind of guidance, or ranking of publications so that our students can find the leading publications for their theses – and I am not ready to leave that role to Google. We “profs” have a better market knowledge and find our way through our social networks. But I regard it as a matter of fairness that publically funded research of excellence should both be visible and accessable to independent researchers and the public, who do not have a large library or ScienceDirect subscriptions behind them. So journals could be helpful in making good research visible, given they are for free (financed through printed issues and donations).

However, publication pools could still provide some kind of peer ranking, and it would be definitely better to have qualified comments from a multitute of peers than only by the two carefully selected by the editor after seeing the paper and the authors name, if he/she does not decide to reject the paper right away (if I wanted to have a paper accepted or rejected, I knew whom to give it – manus manum lavat!) Pool publication therefore seems to me a good first step in the publication process, since it is done openly, and could replace the usual pre-publish circulation, which puts the majority of peers out of the decision. At this stage it would be a good idea to select the reviewers from the best comments which were made in an open forum.

The current rejection rates of 80%+ of top journals indicates a source of inefficiency, which creates a bottleneck for many worthy publications. First, we should only give a paper to reviewers who show active interest in it, positively or negatively. The current system is a waste of time and resources, and it is vulnerable to nepotistic corruption (if you just know the editor well enough). Public peer opinion might be a good step to create interest in a paper. Indeed, the real act of publication is actually done before acceptance by a journal, as is it often the case with working papers. Acceptance into a journal would then be just a honouring distinction after the paper has made its major impact on the current generation of researchers, for the next generation to see. Matching theory implicates that the current system of submissions favours the authors, thus editors should be in support of a system that invites papers out of a pool.

Thanks Daniel for this valuable perspective from a different discipline (and a different campus!)

Seems to me that Mendeley and other users of altmetrics are making moves within the publication pool model. The question for me is whether by reducing the problem of nepotistic corruption, one creates a new problem of countering those who attempt to game these stats for downloads/clicks etc. This doesn’t have to be a problem of bots – one can foresee a situation where a famous academic with ‘000s of Twitter followers would recommend a paper, leading to a big jump in downloads as compared to non-celebrity endorsed papers. Of course, if academics are wholly scrupulous(!) this might just represent a worthy endorsement of a good paper. However, it may also prove to be a new form (albeit more public) of nepotistic corruption.

Notwithstanding these issues, I can see how this pre-publication pool could act as a more efficient means of funnelling good papers to the top journals, where editors could be alerted to those papers that are already creating a buzz (starting to sound like music business A&R managers!) Potential for new problems, no doubt, but intriguing changes to the way knowledge might become produced.

I think Warren made a good point about the ranking metrices, which supports my view that, beside all inefficiencies, journals could seve as important beacons to the scientific communities. I belief no public ranking mechanism is strategy-proof, meaning they all could create in-groop self-citation bubbles. But I think as there are good and bad papers, there are also good and bad comments. Some moderation is needed, however, in such a forum, otherwise we better like us all on facebook.

[…] While there is widespread support for tearing down the paywalls around research findings, changing publishing's funding model raises some significant issues, not least for the social sciences where monographs (books) and other … […]

[…] Under direction from the government, there is a drive to make publicly funded research open access; that is, if you go to the website where the journal article resides, non-subscribers will not be met by a page asking you to … […]

[…] Under direction from the government, there is a drive to make publicly funded research open access; that is, if you go to the website where the journal article resides, non-subscribers will not be met by a page asking you to part with $30+ for the privilege of reading. […]

[…] Under direction from the government, there is a drive to make publicly funded research open access; that is, if you go to the website where the journal article resides, non-subscribers will not be met by a page asking you to part with $30+ for the privilege of reading. […]